Sunday, February 22, 2015

The most important quality in a graduate student is playfulness. A light-hearted excitement about exploring something new.

My heart leaps when a student says, "I was thinking" or "I was wondering", and when those thoughts are far beyond the current topic of conversation. The click-clack of connections, new ones unconsidered before.

This is a student who goes to the library because they want to, not because they have to. They read books far outside their discipline. They create wild, innovative ideas as easily as they breathe.

The best part of my job is when I meet a student like this, and feel great hope about the future.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

As an educator, one of the things that comes up every semester is a student who has "checked out". They stop coming to class and turning in assignments, and you can see their downward trajectory.

What should simply be a small hurdle becomes a 15-foot high tsunami wave for these students. They don't have the psychological resources to go to office hours, work harder, put in the time. So they just let the missed work accumulate until it becomes impossible for them to recover.

When I was an undergraduate I had friends in this place, so it is gut-wrenching to blindly apply a syllabus policy and fail a student in the interest of "fairness". "Fairness" unfortunately means that students on the lower tail of the psychological resource distribution curve get left behind.

What's strange is that this "oh well, tough luck for the student, nothing we can do" sentiment doesn't seem to be quite as prevalent in elementary ed as it is in higher ed. Younger kids having academic trouble have more access to resources to help them - there is a concept of an intervention*. However, for some reason, our society has decided that by the time students are 18 if they struggle in their education it is fully up to them to fix it. Sink or swim.

When faced with a failing student, some people say, "Well, college isn't for everyone", or, worse, "Computer Science isn't for everyone". I disagree. I think everyone is able to do both -- it's just that some people are dealt better hands than others, and our system currently favors those with pocket aces.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

A new course is like a new baby. You have to feed it, bathe it, calm it, put it to bed, keep it appropriately entertained and distracted. You worry about it a lot, especially when it gets sick, to the point of complete distraction from everything else in your life (your job, showering, etc).

The second time you teach a class, it is like having a toddler. It is slightly more capable, but you need to worry about it choking on errant objects, not looking both ways before crossing the street, and ensuring fried potatoes are not the only vegetable it eats.

The third time you teach a class, it is like having a kindergardener. You worry about it occasionally, like when fights or cdiff break out at school, but overall you are considerably more relaxed.

It is around year three or four that you start to get a little heartsad. You miss the excitement you felt when you found That Perfect Example, or The Hilarious Video, or even that time you discovered those amazing lecture notes from the University of Alburquerque on set theory with the two pigs. The course materials don't need you as much as they used to.

So you putter around, tweaking things here and there, while idly toying with the idea that next semester, by golly, you're going to prep a new class. Just as nature makes parents forget the trauma of pregnancy and the agony of not sleeping for 2-3 years, academia, too makes us forget the birth of a course.

Friday, June 27, 2014

When you get a rejection, do you call the editor / program officer / etc. and "give them the business"?

I am curious. I never heard of doing this until a natural scientist friend told me this was common practice in her field for journals. ("That's what the boys do," she whispered conspiratorially).

Having been raised to be quiet and well-behaved (*ahem*), when I receive a rejection I usually take it to mean I need to buckle down and write a better paper / proposal. I assumed that was what everyone did. But apparently some people make phone calls.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

This article by Peter Welch, "Programming Sucks", is probably the best description of our profession I have ever read. Those of you who are computer scientists will read it and say, YES, EXACTLY; those of you who are not computer scientists but think we are mystical beasts from mordor will realize we are not actually mystical beasts. (Though may indeed come from mordor).

Peter's article is so good, I am loathe to quote the clever, funny bits because they're so much better in context; but I have to at least post some some teasers:

Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out for us. The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad.

...

Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Article in New York Magazine about a startup company with four men and one woman ("Amy") acquired by Google. Google elected to only hire the four people with their male bits flipped.

The four men were code monkeys engineers, and Amy was a UX and product designer, and co-founder who contributed tons of ideas. Apparently Google gave massive signing bonuses and salaries to the men, but did not hire her or compensate her during the company acquisition.

Put yourself in this position for just a second. You helped found a company, you contributed major ideas, you got it to the point where Google decides it's worth slurping up. But then:

Do you have any clue what that feels like? It's horrible. It's people saying: "I don't respect you because of how you were born."

It's impossible to imagine this rejection if you are a majority member. Well, I can tell you - it hurts. A lot. Probably one of the hardest pains out there.

The worst part about me reading this article is that this week alone I heard stories about TWO amazing, brilliant, talented, superstar women completely leave their rockstar jobs to adopt non-rockstar occupations.

Why did these brilliant, talented, incredible women leave their rockstar occupations? Because they couldn't handle the sexism any more. They had no fight left in them.

What can you do? Well, sponsor the heck out of / promote the professional women you know.

1) Talk about women to others: "Jane Smith is doing AMAZING work related to yours, you should check out her papers."

2) Invite women: "Let's invite Jane Smith as a keynote speaker, her research rocks" "Let's ask Jane Smith to lead this project, I think she'd do a fantastic job."

3) Suggest women when you're poaching people: "Let's see if we could recruit Jane Smith to our department."

and, if you're a journalist:

4) Interview women. Some publications do well at this, some are still in the stone ages. There are women scientists out there, and they have opinions and interesting things to say too!

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The great Maria Klawe, ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, president of Harvey Mudd, wrote a surprisingly humbling and honest article in Slate on imposter syndrome.

In some ways, this type of article is good for young women in the field, because they figure if superstars like her can feel it, they can feel it too. i.e., "It's normal to feel this way."

Except, it's not normal to feel this way.

The reason we feel like we don't belong / aren't good enough, is because we've been encultured to believe this since Day 1. The message from the media is passive pink, and rarely are young women cast in roles of lead scientist in film and television. The whiz computer genius in a show usually looks like this:

But it does. This is how kids choose careers. As much as we'd like to think that our annual science outreach visit to our children's classrooms hugely influences students' future career learnings, we're talking marbles vs. Large Hadron Collider. Hollywood is it.

So for the lucky few who manage to beat the cultural odds and enter our field anyway, they have one more major hurdle.

It's not the intellectual requirements of the job.
It's not work-life balance.
And it's certainly not babies!

Nope. It is eight little words that skewer you with a knife. Eight little words that knock you down in one fell swoop.

Eight little words that men never hear.

"You only got here because you're a woman".

Have you ever said this to someone? Have you ever thought this and not said it?

This is an awful, awful thing to say. Why? Because underlying it is the assumption that only men can do computer science. Why on earth would you think that?

I first heard these words as an undergraduate, from someone I thought was a close friend. I felt sick to my stomach. I never felt imposter syndrome before that point. I loved technology, I was good at understanding how it worked, and how to make it do the things I wanted it to do. Up until that point, I assumed my strong technical abilities and grades was why I had been admitted into the program. Surely not my gender!

After I felt sick, I felt mad. Really mad! Who was this joker to tell me I didn't belong here? I'll show him.

Now, I'm fortunate, because I face adversity with stubbornness. It's just my nature. But most people are not like this. They get beaten down with a stick enough times, and they head for the hills. I can completely understand that, I've had my moments.

Here's the thing. Every time you say or even think these eight words, you're beating someone with a stick. You might think it's an innocuous statement, but really what you're saying is, "Go home dumb little girl."

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All of this blog's content is (c) 2014 by Female Computer Scientist, except for comments, which belong to the original authors of them.

The image in the banner is "Women Wiring the ENIAC", and is a US Army Archival Photograph in the public domain. The biography image is a sketch of Ada Lovelace, and to the best of my knowledge is in the public domain.